Jack Zipes says that children's literature has come of age. It has long been the focus of sustained interest by practitioners and scholars, so coming of age implies that children's literature has emerged from the critical limbo and can now hold its own – critically, bibliographically, professionally – with other areas of literature. It is a passage traced also by popular fiction and popular culture. One of the signs of coming of age – and the rite of passage analogy is not accidentally given the subject – is to have a mature, comprehensive and systematic infrastructure of reference, bibliographical, and critical material to support formal and informal study and research.
Reference works in this field have grown in number and stature in recent years – Carpenter and Prichard (1984), Cullinan and Person (2001), Watson (2001), Hunt (2004) (RR 2005/196) – and with this Oxford encyclopaedia we have the breadth and depth that will satisfy most academic collection‐builders and private collectors and specialists. Its gestation started editorially in 2000 and the four‐volume outcome is impressive – wide‐ranging in English‐language materials, objective in critical terms, sound historically, clearly written and well‐edited.
Jack Zipes is known for important critical works and he is ably supported by a strong editorial team (including Kay Vandergrift, Kimberley Reynolds, and Roderick McGillis), international advisers, all contributing to the 3,200 entries that are arranged alphabetically letter‐by‐letter. Volume 1 contains a short introduction and Volume 4 contains a 200‐page index, a topical outline of entries, and a short directory of major collections. Some 400 black‐and‐white illustrations (for example, images from McCloskey and Lobel, Watts and Sesame Street, as well as photos of authors like Nöstlinger and Lowry) appear throughout. The set is securely and brightly hardback‐bound, making it an attractive addition to the shelves of the academic library where children's literature is studied, as well as to the school and college library keen to have an authoritative and user‐friendly (children can use it as well as adults!) reference work. The choice will be more difficult if you already have, say, Watson, but, if you have the money, think seriously about buying Zipes.
Weevilling into the body of the book itself, there is much to see. You have expectations – of coverage and critical analysis and accuracy – when you search for information on Ardizzone or Asbj?rnsen, Bannerman or Berenstain, Bunyan and Byars, Causley and Chukovsky, Danziger and De Regniers, Engdahl and Ewing, Fleischmann and Geras, Hadath and Hergé, Ichikawa and Jansson, Kellogg and Konigsburg, Lang and Lindsay, Marryat and Meltzer, Morpurgo and Needham, the Opies and Preussler, the Religious Trace Society and Rousseau, Scarry and Sendak, Steig and Sutcliff, Trimmer and Velthuijs, Wildsmith and Yolen and Zemach. This gives readers an idea of the range of coverage in the encyclopedia.
Individual entries are succinct, well‐edited, well coordinated with appropriate cross‐references (for example, connecting up animal books like those of Moray Williams, Wain, and Salten, and these themselves are well‐supported by the index), topical without being merely fashionable, and a good mix of “life and works” information. Taking six typical entries, Bewick (with concise information on his illustrator and trade background), Garner (a well researched entry with key works and plot‐lines and a balanced view of his fantasy), Lenski (her influence in her day and since, her realism and her own life), Nesbit (her originality, the way she blends everyday reality with magic, her understanding of time travel, her socialism), Pyle (the illustrator whose medieval tales are remembered today, appreciating the successful marriage in his books between text and illustration), and E.B. White (well‐known for Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web, which are discussed perceptively, but also someone who lived a very rich life).
Some of the shorter entries are understandably made up of lists of publications and/or biographical details (awards, achievements, etc). Topical entries are a feature that make the encyclopaedia strong: entries like adventure, realism, nonsense, multiculturalism, and religious writing are elegant portals to the critical range and issues in their fields, and can of course be followed up, using the same reference work, with author entries. Again the index helps (and almost certainly, in a library context, the catalogue will come into its own as well). There are country/geographical entries, too, like ones on the USA and the Arab World and Nordic countries, African American literature and Native American children's literature. Their inclusion is not merely for political correctness (over‐active generally in the children's literature field) but in the interests of comprehensiveness. Most entries append helpful, well chosen and topical further readings, and at the end of Volume 4 there is a good general bibliography.
Further entries can be found on publishing, libraries, pop‐up and ABC and miniature books, comics, reading schemes, a lot of history, generic fiction like dime detective fiction, and topics like censorship and critical approaches. Specialists will recognise the issues and the sources, while anyone using the book, specialist or not, young reader or not, will find the signposts to other things very useful. Zipes and his team say that the tried to pick out the most significant work in English‐language children's literature, acknowledging that, although Canada and New Zealand and India and elsewhere come in, the emphasis is Anglo‐American. Watson's book merits comparison here because that is also strong on this. Comparison should also be made with Doderer (1992) for material in the German context. You can also search under terms like pantomime, myths, and fairy tales.
It was good to see inclusion of the internet and computer games and film adaptations, and area clearly ripe for more systematic critical attention (Kline's piece on the internet, for instance, is revealingly thin on specific books on the internet and children's culture – things are simply not there yet!). This vindicates Zipes's claim that the encyclopedia covers everything from medieval children's literature to the twenty‐first century (i.e. from The Babees Book to J.K. Rowling, Goody Two‐shoes to Dicj Bruna and Terry Pratchett), and connects the book up to modern study and teaching methods which cut across media.
Coming of age is a not‐unmixed blessing – children's literature is now more of an industry, more criss‐crossed by pretentious theorising, more cross‐cultural in a post‐modern sense, more dismissive of the past, more assertive. Yet a moment's thought confirms that these very issues were alive and well in the field (if it saw itself as one at the time) in, say, the 1790s (think of Rousseau, Day and Edgeworth), the period 1840‐1870 (think of Charlesworth, Carroll and Rossetti), the years between and after the wars (think of imperialism and Blyton), and the 1960s with its controversial realism.
At these times, the reference infrastructure was erratic, often specialist (think of Gumuchian and Osborne as insights into the past), often in elusive articles and soon to be remaindered monographs. In the last 20 years, with above all Hunt and Cullinan and now Zipes, at least this infrastructure has improved. Critically the issues still rebound but they are more visible, more researchable (by anyone from primary school student to scholar), and, with encyclopaedias like the one under review here, the discussion has grown up. Historiographically, it confirms that. It is a book for which we have waited a long time.
